Settling into DK (at least for a while :-)

The last month here has been absolutely crazy busy. At the end of May I did a presentation of my thesis in its rough draft form for my advisors and some teachers at SLU (in Sweden). Even though I have been living in Copenhagen since February, my thesis is technically being turned into the university in Sweden where I was from Sept 2008 until Feb 2009.

Also in May Morten and I were looking for a place to either rent or buy. After many headaches (for Morten) finally a place was found, secured, and bought. Due to Danish laws I could not be on the loan but it has all worked out. In early June we both moved into the new place in the neighborhood of Nørrebro in Copenhagen. Nørrebro is easily the most diverse area of Copenhagen so there are a lot of immigrants here, which means great shops and restaurants at good prices.

The apartment is called a andelslejlighed, which translates into something like cooperative apartment. Its seems to be a uniquely Danish type of housing. So we have bought into the apartment building with this apartment, with a quite minimal loan. But you don't ever own it in the same sense that you would a condo. We can sell it in the future but the price is set by the cooperative. There are also strict laws for sub-letting to make sure people don't buy these cheapish places and then rent it out for much higher prices. So the deal is you have a rather low loan and then have to pay a monthly 'rent', which for us is about $350 USD/month. This does not go away and pays for the upkeep of the building facilities (laundry, common area, and showers - yes, showers).

These apartments were originally built over 100 years ago for working families, and have maintained some of their charm, which might also be viewed as inconveniences. Among the charms is the detail work on the ceilings, which although annoying to paint, is actually very nice. Among the inconveniences - the bath/shower situation.

As we live on the ground floor and have no next door apartment, we are lucky in our building because we have our own toilet. The apartments above us (2 on each floor) share a toilet that is in the hallway. What we do not have (yet, yet is the operative word here) is our own shower. Sooo to take a shower we have to go outside our building across a small court yard (see photo below) and to the basement of the next building, down through a curvey hall cave-labrynth to the showers. This shared shower room situation is not at all strange to Danes used to living in Copenhagen but it has taken me some getting used to. Surely its a good change for our carbon footprint.














Fortunately, the showers are nice, clean, and hot. Many of the apartments have installed showers in the apartment so there is never a wait and I rarely encounter anyone in the room. Its locked so you can only get in there with a key. However, because our apartment is on the first floor and we have some special perks to our place we can install a shower where the toilet is. So, the goal is to have a shower installed before fall/winter. Therefore, best to visit next year just to be safe :-)!

Here is a photo of the livingroom, we have sort of an American Indian/South America motif going on so far.














Here is the kitchen...















And this sitting area and grill are right outside our apartment. The plan is to have a birthday/graduation/house-warming/everything else we have forgotten to have a party for Party sometime in early-mid July.